


Six Penny, Seven Stone

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:13:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8415109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Timing is everything. Tonks's was always just a little bit off-kilter.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escribo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escribo/gifts).



> Hi escribo! I love all of your requested HP pairings so much I wish I could treat you for all of them; congrats on your taste. This is a bit late but I hope you enjoy it!

In sunny retrospect Tonks supposed she should’ve seen it coming so of course she didn’t. She had been working on a few extremely unsexy odd jobs for the Order that no one else wanted and had somehow along the way acquired Fleur Delacour as a permanent partner in all things unpleasant and vaguely life-threatening, which added a certain dimension of frustrated sexual tension to the whole thrilling endeavor. Tonks had actually met her at Gringotts early that summer when she went to exchange a few galleons for Muggle money and Fleur informed her with an intriguing geologic bluntness that she needed another sickle if Tonks wanted ten shillings; two days later Fleur had taken a seat next to her in the disillusioned room at the Cambridge Senate House where the Order met for the first time among the tinny fear and disbelief and explained in a glacial rebuke aimed squarely at Dumbledore’s head that she would not be doing any unpaid cooking or cleaning for the duration of the war. When she got up to leave she put her hand on Tonks’s knee for balance and squeezed just enough to leave a deeply brazen suggestion tingling up the insides of her thighs.

For all the clandestine eroticism of the thing it amounted to a whole lot of sultry nothing. Fleur accompanied her to exclusive pureblood parties that summer, posing as a personal assistant or dear live-in friend to Tonks’s erectile dysfunction potion heiress while they listened to one of the Yaxleys moan about the dilution of sanctified old blood and got handsy over hors d’oeuvres. Still Fleur seemed disappointingly unaffected by her spectacular breasts in a vicious push-up bra or the Dietrich-esque raised eyebrow/lit cigarette combo: she made advances and spurned Tonks’s and eventually after reporting to the Powers That Be after nights out ruffling robes in enemy territory they ended up at a neon-sleazy diner or got takeout and ate it at one of their flats—Tonks in Southwark, Fleur in Camden—until they fell asleep at opposite ends of the couch after sharing a joint or chamomile tea and watching X-Files and EastEnders reruns. In theory, they kept to their own sides as well as they could, but in practice, their limbs did often wander.

In late August, when the air had begun to hold blue in the afternoons with the coming autumn hoarfrost, they went down to Exeter to see about an estate sale rumored to contain dark artifacts once belonging to Gellert Grindlewald and while there they indeed ran into Alecto Carrow who outbid them on a strange mahogany carving the auctioneer described with a loaded reverence as a “music box,” though Tonks won a book she suspected to be cursed with a particular bias towards Muggleborns while Fleur hissed prices in her ear, so close her teeth occasionally grazed the silver piercings lining her cartilage. Bite down, she wanted to say, just fucking do it, right here. 

Once they had wrapped the book in a bedsheet from the hotel room as a precautionary measure they had a greasy dinner at a pub a few blocks away where Tonks kept sliding the toe of her boot against the bare insides of Fleur’s ankles. Now that she didn’t have to keep up appearances around the dark magic connoisseurs her hair was a deep pink blush again and her eyes were green and slightly unslept underneath, her nails—as ever—bitten down to stumpy nothings. The radio was playing The Breeders’ “Cannonball” and the wild throaty blare of the guitar was making her nerves jangle like a live wire.

“You take me to all the nice places,” Fleur said, gesturing happily around the room with a chip between her thumb and forefinger. She’d just asked a series of invasive personal questions about how it felt for Tonks to lengthen her fingers or give herself breasts the size of cantaloupes and how much she liked it, to which the answers were _like some kind of fucking miraculous taffy_ and _very very_ , respectively. “We’re going to die so young. But we will be full and happy at least.”

“Speak for yourself. That fucking book’s full of that, by the by—madness, war, death by fire, all the Unforgiveables. A whole chapter about the actual beneficiary aspects of witch burnings. And incest.” Despite the dismal and apocalyptically horrifying contents it had a lurid, here-comes-the-train-wreck appeal; briefly she thought of Bellatrix’s name on the tapestry at Number Twelve and wondered whether this was within the realm of typical dysfunction or something hereditary and concerning.

“Maybe we could read it together as an English exercise, or a bedtime story,” said Fleur. She still drew out all her vowels like honey so it came out like _Eeeen-glish_ , although Tonks was never sure she didn’t make it sound as ridiculous as possible on purpose. Regardless it was one of her top ten favorite things about Fleur, and definitely one of the sexiest, though the list was revised frequently.

“It’s an awful lot of death and agonizing torture et cetera for light reading. There’s a heavy emphasis on household devices as impromptu torture instruments, it’d be like, I don’t know, eating a whole pan of gravy before bed. It’s not going to sit well.”

“If you can’t teach me you can just say so.”

“I can teach you just fine,” said Tonks. “Just, like, the sexual depravity alone. Look through it if you want but whatever you can imagine it’s worse and there’s probably a meat mallet and ritual murder involved.”

“This is not deterring me,” said Fleur, putting emphasis on her new favorite word. “I’ve read plenty of wartime stories. I almost understand the possession-by-death aspect of it now, although it is mostly all so disappointingly male.”

Tonks stole a chip from Fleur’s plate, and then stole some ketchup. “Yeah, I can get that. It’s just, all the obsessive doom of it, y’know? If I want that I’ll just talk to Moody for ten minutes.”

“But don’t you think about it? The, what do you call it, I don’t know. The wartime twilight. Dreaming of dying.”

“Do you get off on this or something?” Tonks asked. Secretly she liked it when Fleur talked like an apocalypse oracle seeing omens in cigarette smoke and teacups; under the table she pressed her ankle into Tonks’s with a kind of heady pressure against the bone-ridge.

“Of course not. I was only asking because it seems relevant currently. I was also going to ask if you ever think about getting over yourself and doing something about _this_ ,” said Fleur, leaning across the table. Her eyes were a hostile blue and her lips were parted slightly but really she looked remarkably like she’d just been discussing defense tactics out of a book. “Since it is wartime. But you are oblivious. Or just always misunderstanding.”

“Are you coming _on_ to me? Like, right here?”

“I will pay,” said Fleur, “as you cannot convert your money still, yes? Go on,” she nodded to the door, tossing her hair back over her shoulder in a veil that seemed briefly to ripple like water, or flame, “I will meet you outside.”

So she waited with her heart between her teeth feeling strung up and lit like a strand of lights, and when Fleur finally came back outside to the dun-colored alleyway smelling like rose and Earl Grey among all the old piss and beer, she shoved Tonks back into the wall and fucking _finally_ bit down on her ear, dragging her tongue along the metal rings lining her lobe to her cartilage. At the time it felt like the logical conclusion to a decade’s fraught and unconsummated sexual tension, except they had only known each other since June. She pushed off the bricks and into Fleur, fingers scrabbling at her shoulders and then in her hair until eventually she let herself be pressed back by the hips again and snuck a hand up Fleur’s skirt, cupping her through her underwear and grinding her palm down until she felt Fleur break away and gasp against her lips, watching Tonks with a feral sort of wonder before she took her bottom lip between her dagger-point teeth and tugged hard.

“We could Apparate back to my place, easy-peasy,” said Tonks, tasting a bright iron-burn of blood, hands clutching at Fleur’s waist.

“Too far.”

“The hotel doesn’t even have a record player,” she complained. Sometimes she wanted a soundtrack with sex and this was absolutely one of those times given the general simmering time-bomb emotional caldera of their relationship to date. “It’d take like, five Apparition points. You can side-along me all the way if you want.”

“I am not going to let you _carry_ me home and I am not waiting this long just to puke on my shoes when we get there,” said Fleur in a tight hiss, and thus they Apparated to their hotel room where there were two narrow twin beds like something out of a repressed 50s Muggle sitcom. They picked the nearest one and got each other out of their clothes in about eight seconds, which Tonks vaguely registered as some kind of record as she straddled Fleur’s thigh and leaned down to kiss her with a thumb stroking underneath one of her breasts, the angle making the slow, wet slide of their lips somehow more compelling; again Fleur bit her bottom lip between her teeth when Tonks’s fingers circled her clit and then stroked inside her, first just one, then another, up to the second knuckle.

More than any other sex she’d had it felt very much like a kind of possession or a co-inhabitation, as if they were two pieces of the same miraculous machine welded irresistibly together. She slid her fingers up Fleur’s slit to rub corkscrew-patters against it and back down again, thrusting in a percussive rhythm like a match-flare while she rode Fleur’s thigh, the long molten rush of it dragging through her and spreading out like wildfire. Fleur slid a hand down her ass and then pressed her fingers slowly up underneath Tonks’s clit where she was wet, her hair spread out like a crown of thorns, and Tonks faltered at the heavy sweeping rush of it, her fingers stroking around-above Fleur’s clit. Inside herself she could feel both of them shaking like bent willow branches.

Before Fleur could come Tonks slid down her body and circled her tongue around the fingers crooking shallowly inside her, pressing in with just the tips when she sucked Fleur’s clit into her mouth and felt her clench hard around her almost at once, spine arched in a shattering crescendo-arc. Fleur didn’t even let her bask in her hazy smugness before she shoved Tonks down by the shoulders and fingered her until she came with a sort of foxfire-shiver like a swallowing magnetic north inside her, Fleur’s fingers drawing something runic over her clit while the orgasm diffused across her skin in a pulsebeat thrum. It was a while before she caught her breath; they seemed so wide-open to each other, newborn, their naked skin almost raw. On Fleur’s belly and thighs she could see the wet red marks she’d left with her mouth.

Afterwards they laid close together on the twin bed with the sheets kicked off and slid their hands along the basins of their bellies and rib-rungs and the stacked ladders of their spines the until they got carried away with it and made each other come again. Then Tonks got up and made tea, and Fleur went to the window naked and opened it to the lullaby hush of the evening music outside. The rest was history.

By the time October came they were keeping spare toothbrushes at each other’s flats and Fleur had taken to wearing one of her flannels out in Muggle London, which gave Tonks a wild thrill which she knew splashed all over her face like incriminating red ink every single time from the way Fleur’s mouth twisted at the corner when she kissed her. Both of them kicked in their sleep sometimes, which was ideal because they canceled each other out, and as time went on Tonks took it to mean that their entire relationship was a fundamental cosmic truth necessary or inevitable to the order of things. Fleur laughed and kissed her when Tonks told her as much after too much gin while they were listening to Slowdive. “The universe requires that you fuck me right now,” said Fleur, sliding her hands up Tonks’s belly and squeezing her breasts.

The war was the war was the war. It ripped black-hole ozone tears in their atmosphere: murder, suspicion, doubt, fear, pain, rage, loss, blood, blankness, nothingness, death and death and more death. People went to turn off the teakettles in their kitchens and their partners or roommates discovered them missing minutes later. Twice she was ambushed, once coming back from the corner store on a nighttime cigarette run, once at an old pureblood club outside of Leeds during which she and Fleur had to Apparate to a designated safe house in Cumbria and then hid in the trees; Moody chewed them out for compromising one of their few warehouses and Tonks chewed him out when he said he’d send Proudfoot next time. And so it went.

Increasingly she felt stretched across some infinite rack between the Ministry and the Order. She took to wearing unfamiliar faces for both even when the job didn’t necessitate it and stared at herself in bathroom mirrors with an out-of-body uncomprehension, but when she got home she could feel her magic pulsing in the very core of her burgeoning soul wanting to be something else—she wove atoms into cells, cells into tissue, tissue into organs, organs into systems, systems into color and shape and sound and form until she had matched herself to her unborn reflection. No matter what skin she stitched herself into Fleur always recognized her, which Tonks liked to think—probably too prettily—was the holy magic that came from loving someone, or possibly just because their clothes smelled like each other. Lupin told her after she’d wondered aloud on one such occasion that veela often had a unique feel for detecting magical signatures, like she didn’t already know that, and then he said it was because her face made it fairly obvious, which was fucking rich coming from him. At the time he’d been wearing a scarf adjusted ever so slightly to show the budlike suggestion of a hickey, like he wanted to make it obvious he was trying to hide it. Still, he and Sirius seemed to consider themselves the world’s foremost masters of subterfuge and mystery while keeping all their things in one room and wearing each other’s clothes or leaning in too close when they forgot other people were around, and it seemed important not to shatter their delusions. Knowing gave her a fierce sort of joy even if Lupin was a little bit insufferable after he’d just gotten laid.

The nights drew in with the early frost, nipping at their heels like waves. She stopped by Gringotts on her lunch breaks and had Fleur make Muggle money for her, which she spent at the Muggle supermarket on cheese and bread and good pears and whiskey; in the evenings they made carbonara and potato-leek soup and burnt acorn squash when they got distracted fucking on the kitchen table. They walked along Regent’s Canal where the trees were showing the first flush of their autumn blood against the vast blue wilderness of the sky and breathed the smoky leaf-loam to forget they were breathing and eating and sleeping with the war. At a private art showing in Oxford featuring ancient dark objects they pretended not to know each other, and after a lengthy introduction that involved several glasses of vintage champagne and scintillating invasions of personal space Tonks brushed their hips together as she so very accidentally dropped an onion tart down Fleur’s dress and then made a show of her apology as they retreated to the bathroom, where Tonks ate her out for twenty minutes.

“So on a scale of one to ten how right am I in thinking that you stayed in England purely because of your palpable lust for me,” she asked. They were sitting on Tonks’s couch with spiced apple cider and the orange matchstick glow of the scythe moon lancing through the curtains, which fluttered softly with the dusty-bright chill of October breath. On the record player she’d put on the Raincoats; Fleur looked at her and smiled with only the left side of her mouth, her eyes shifting down to where Tonks’s shirt was unbuttoned nearly to her midriff.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” said Fleur. The moonlight fit them both: it turned their skin a kind of unworldly rose and made the long shadow-play of their limbs and fingers look like something out of an infernal nightmare ritual. “But eight, if I must be honest, twelve if I must humor you.”

“Good one.”

“Who would I be if I left you to make Muggle change on your own. We would never get anywhere and you would still be buying bad magic cheeses.”

Tonks supposed she couldn’t argue and tugged on a strand of Fleur’s hair that had come loose from its low chignon. “Make me a mix tape about it,” she said.

“It would be probably half of _Recurring_ at least. And that Babes in Toyland album you like.”

“We can trade,” she said, “like, I’ve actually given this some thought. And it'd be an excuse to tell you how much Throbbing Gristle makes me think of you, I mean, every single time. It's _scary_ , so.”

“I hate to be creepy but—”

“You’re the creepiest person I know,” said Tonks.

“Shut up. At first, I thought about just putting ‘Cheree’ on a mix tape ten times and giving it to you for your birthday as a joke. But not really.”

They had fucked to ‘Cheree’ on several memorable occasions; Tonks’s heart beat in her chest like a door opening. “I’d like that and I'm sure you'd like it very much if I know anything about you, and I _do_. And for the record I know this is fucked up but if there was going to be a horrific wizarding war there’s no one I’d rather suffer with.” Here, Fleur leaned over and kissed the join of her jaw and her ear with a deeply sensual graze of teeth. “If the world ended tomorrow I’m not saying I’d be thrilled about it, right, but all things considered I’m very happy. You do make me very happy, in case you didn’t notice, and since I'm turning into a pile of ooze apparently.”

“It is obvious. You get this look—”

“I _know_.”

“And it’s like you have just done some new magic,” said Fleur. Her eyes were very soft. “I think—Tonks, I think sometimes I knew somehow it was going to be you, you know. With your mathematical errors. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried.”

The enormity of it buzzed in the backs of her teeth and she felt vaguely as if she were falling for a brief moment; she considered a stroke for a split second but really it was the dizzy, elated head-rush that came from realizing that your heart was subject to the ineffable gravity of another person. “Come on, then,” she said, grabbing Fleur by the belt loops, “suffer with me.”

After a while the fog rolled in like smoke and obscured the face of the moon in a sheet of gauze while they watched at the windows huddled to it and each other like moths. Come morning they were meant to leave for Yorkshire, where the vein-lines of the war had stretched them thin underneath the bloody tectonic geography of their own history; it felt sometimes like chipping away at a monolith with a toothpick. Hatred was self-seeding and you never got anywhere unless you cut it out by the roots but it was easier to spread new soil over the festering fault-line pulse of it and pretend it wasn’t there.

When they went to bed they laid an extra blanket over the quilt and left the window open to the blood-rime of the moon and the burnt October sweetness of the breeze, and in the flicker of their breath Tonks thought she could feel the innate umbilical pulse of a song only they knew; half-asleep she brushed an open-mouthed kiss to Fleur’s shoulder and felt her heart pick up with the press of it. She was always dreaming about this—about coming back to this like an echo strung out across time and history and futures, her bent knees and Fleur’s bent knees, her mouth and Fleur’s mouth, her shadow and Fleur’s shadow blurring together on the walls, under the streetlamps. Anything could be endured at all if she could come back to this always; they had miles and miles to go but they would find their rhythm again. Outside the moon unfogged with the gathering darkness and glowed golden through the gap between the curtains.


End file.
